I am Cuba

Special Features

Theatrical Trailer

Aspect Ratio: full-frame (1.33)

I am Cuba (1964) is unabashed propaganda masterpiece, which had not been seen outside the Soviet Union or Cuba until 1992. Milestone's excellent full-frame transfer is from the 1995 re-release, which made the arthouse rounds thanks to the concerted efforts of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (this explains the opening intertitle "Francis Ford Coppola & Martin Scorsese presents"). As it was for them, I am Cuba is a revelation. Who would have thought that one of the most invigorating films to be released on DVD in recent years would be a Soviet-Cuban agitprop from 1963. The film is set in Cuba with four episodes that chronologically advance toward Castro's revolution of 1959. The stories are conventional propaganda fodder: the first, set mainly around a decadent Batista stronghold hotel, sees a fruit vendor's heartthrob forced through poverty to prostitute herself to a corrupt American. The American treats the exchange casually, claiming that he wants to see how "prostitutes live, because he's interested." But once immersed in the squalor (he has to step on stones to avoid water when going to her hut) and is accosted by screaming children begging him for money, he scampers away like an alarmed puppy. The conclusion of the episode recalls the second episode in Roberto Rossellini's neo-realist classic Paisa (1946), where a GI helplessly runs off from a colony of war orphans. To dramatize the American's realization of the social inequity under the Batista regime, Kalatazov employs quick, short dolly movements into the downtrodden faces of the old and the poor, something which again recalls Rossellini, this time his famous edict about every camera movement making a moral statement. In the second episode, an old sugar cane farmer goes mad when government officials tell him his land has been sold to the United Fruit Co. In this segment, Kalatazov uses a baroque stylistic mix of Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Eisenstein and the 1940's/1950's films of director Emilio Fernandez and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. And speaking of great director/cinematographer teams, I am Cuba represents the third collaboration between Mikhail Kalatazov (1903-1973) and Sergei Urusevsky (1908-1974). The third segment revolves around the subversive, counter-Batista activities of a group of revolutionary students; and the fourth takes place in the Orient Mountains where Castro's army battled Batista in the months leading to the successful revolution of 1959.

The stories may seem pedestrian but the style is audacious, a moving camera version of Eisenstein's post-Soviet Revolution montage of attraction. Some of the long takes are breathtaking, especially considering the film's low budget and minimal camera technology (nearly 100% of the film was shot hand-held). Two long takes stand out. The first is an extreme wide-angle, 3 minute plus shot which begins on a landing above the hotel pool, dollies past a crowd of beauty contestants, cranes down two stories to the pool level, and ends up following a woman into the water (this camera moving under water is replayed as an homage in Paul Anderson's Boogie Nights, 1997)! And the second is a remarkable shot from the third segment that captures a funeral procession of a murdered revolutionary (Enrique) from high above a rooftop. The shot begins on the street, selecting the murdered man's girlfriend amidst the crowd, then cranes up the wall of a building until it reaches the landing, then tracks right along the landing into a cigar factory; the dolly then moves vertically through the factory toward an open veranda door looking out over the procession. The workers hang a Cuban flag out of the window in honor of the murdered Cuban. However, the shot does not stop here but "miraculously" (cable wires reveal how the movement is achieved) cranes straight ahead forward in mid air over the huge procession nestled between two buildings. The camera's flight recalls the fallen dove which the hero had earlier carried as a symbol of the revolution's determination and symbolizes the revolutionary spirit as it hovers above the huge crowd gathered in the street below.

The film no doubt influenced the much more noted Cuban film by Humberto Solas, Lucia (1968) in its narrative structure, theme and, to some extent, style. In Lucia, Solas uses politically motivated stylistic changes between three period episodes. The style also changes between segments in I am Cuba, although not as consistently or rigorously as in Lucia, progressing from the frenetic wide-angle, snake-like opening to a more "reserved" camera style in the last episode. Thematically the segments evolve from the giddy, humorous decadence of the opening to the more traditional Soviet mythologizing of the latter two. I am Cuba carries many of the traditional ideological conventions of the Marxist-Leftist film. For example, emphasizing the collective hero over the bourgeois individual hero. This is expressed through the martyred young rebel student Enrique. In the third segment policeman use high-powered water hoses to break up a populist rally. Enrique breaks away from the crowd and walks alone with stone in hand toward a burly police officer, who calmly shoots him dead. The shot is framed so that the crowd is visible behind Enrique as he walks determinedly against the water. His death serves to drive home the ineffectuality of individual action and the need for solidarity.

The film's formal experimentation skips back in time past the socialist realism of the 1930's to the classic 1920's Soviet period. But while the earlier Soviet propaganda films were pictorially static, relying on montage for kineticism (and we can add Triumph of the Will and other German Fascist films and Soviet Social Realist films), I am Cuba is the complete opposite, with the camera continually moving! The film, shot almost entirely hand-held, is relentless with incredible shifts of movement and direction. The first segment is almost mondo, from the extended helicopter shots over wooded areas (a classic mondo opening) to the outsider's view of Cuban culture (music, dance, decadent tourists, prostitutes, shanty town poverty). The second segment recalls Dovzhenko's Earth (1930) with its camera low to the ground peering through sugar cane plants and rhythmic swish pans back and forth from the farmer madly swinging his scythe from the stalks to the sky/sun. The third segment is pure Eisenstein, echoing the temporarily squelched revolutionary zeal of Strike (1925) and Potemkin (1927). Revolutionary students and public defiantly march down a series of Odessa-like steps; Enrique's earlier described guilt-ridden suicide march toward the fat police villain (like the brutish fat villain of Strike) amid the textured fury of hosed water and smoke bombs. These and other images, often taken from a canted low angle, recall the glorious revolutionary images of Eisenstein. And throughout, the aesthetic spirit of Marxist Dialectics prevails, like shift in the first episode from the Americanized hotel glamour to the aestheticized shanty town squalor. While the final under-lit mountains segment is more reminiscent of the final episode of Paisa than any Soviet film. All in all I am Cuba is pure unadulterated propaganda but spirited, enthusiastic and always formally invigorating. Outside of some minor speckling and frame jitter in the opening reels the image quality of Image Entertainment's DVD is excellent, capturing Urusevsky's outstanding high contrast black and white cinematography. The yellow subtitles are also always legible and unobtrusive.